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Windows Server 2003: Recover a system that could not start

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Last night, my Openfiler iSCSI SAN failed with a “kernel panic” stop message. All virtual machines on that VMware ESX cluster froze. After finding the problem, I rebooted the Openfiler machine, and the server came back successfully. While checking the virtual machines, I encountered another problem with my development MS SQL server.

Just after POST, a black screen appeared and the boot process stopped. Unfortunately, I did not have a screenshot, but the message was something like:

Windows Server could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

The last time I encountered this problem, I could not fix it without reinstalling the OS. I had no recent backup and was running out of options for getting this virtual machine running again.

Attach the disk to another virtual machine

  1. Shut down the VM.
  2. Shut down another working VM.
  3. Mount the virtual disk of the failed Windows installation on the second VM and boot it.
  4. After Windows has booted on the second virtual machine, assign a drive letter to the failed Windows installation.

I went to E:\Windows\System32\config and got the following error message.

\Windows\System32\config is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Windows System32 config is not accessible

I right-clicked the volume, opened Properties and selected the Tools tab. I clicked “check now” to repair the volume. At 9%, I received a warning and the process stopped. I then remembered chkdsk.exe and ran it from the command line:

Code1 line
1

chkdsk e: /f

chkdsk /f

After the disk check finished, I could access all the folders. I shut down the virtual machine, disconnected the virtual disk and booted my development SQL server. After five minutes, the machine was up and running. This saved me at least a couple of days of work restoring the configuration and getting everything working.

Windows Server 2003 Registry Hive Recovered

Windows showed the warning " Windows - Registry Hive Recovered". I could log on to the server again and make sure a proper backup was in place. The same approach can be used with a physical disk, but the HDD needs to be installed in another machine.